A group of avocets.

Hi there!

Yestarday a made a short vist to my LP and and when I started "sweeping" the east coast close to a swan and three yellow legged gulls, I saw a nice group of fourteen avocets resting inside the shallow waters (they were very far away and probably there was one more...difficult to asses).

Always a nice surprise around here because they are not common visitors.

Zolina reservor-241119

Heavily cropped pic made from about 1000 meter distance.

Surprise in the water pudddle

Hello there! 

This past weekend I had the opportunity to visit the ricefields located in Arguedas village in the southern part of my county, Navarra. 

Those fields are very important during the migration period and in the winter seasson a few stay around. 

During the morning, better said  the two hours that I stayed around I only saw a pair of shorebirds, a green sandpiper and a dunlin. I found the two birds in a quite big water puddle close to a pig farm. 

The recent showers have created this atractiv site and as usual the opportunistic tringa was already there. The dunlin presence puzzled my a bit more, due to their preference to other kind of muddflats. 

Both waders stay quite close to each other but the green mobbed the calidris when they got to close. This behaviour is typicall from the tringa as they are less social birds. 

I could manage to take a few pics without disturbing them and I left the place with the aim of finding more shorebirds in the bast ricefields around. After a while I was unsuccesfull and had to go back home. 

Arable fields...

Hi there!

We are now well entered in autumn and the weather here lately corroborates this, with persistent rains all over the county and considerable descent of the temperatures (some mountains around have appeared this morning with a thin layer of snow).

Those circumstances favor the arrival of some migratory birds from northern Europe that will spent the winter over here or might continue their journey to southern sites.

Those pics below show a mixed group of european starlings with a dozen lapwings ,one solitary dunlin and five ruffs feeding in waterlogged arable fields close to the Pitillas reservoir.

Starlings with waders, a very regular combination in autumn/winter.

I thought that the two common snipes will show up in this pic......

Pictures; Pitillas/091119/Navarra/Ornitocampero

The last ones?

Hi there.

A few days ago I visited my LP (Zolina reservoir) again to see what was around and expecting either a maritime gull or any kind of wader due to the heavy NW winds that were forecasted those days.

I didn't detect any gull but in the far distance in the eastern island of the reservoir, four little shorebirds were "sewing" the mud in tight group. They seemed to be dunlins but with a 1000m distance viewing nothing to take for granted.

I decided to get closer and reasure my suspicion ,also because I had time for a little walk. The conditions were good for the telescope with no wind and filtered midday light by the cloudy sky.

As soon as I arrived to the observation spot and pointed the birds I realized that they were dunlins but one of them looked like a sanderling (much rarer indoor wader over here) due to his more compact body,shorter bill and greyer mantle/scapulars. 

So I had to wait a little bit more in order to get another bird angle (and light) to confirm that it was indeed a dunlin and no a sanderling. The four of them were dressed with the winter plumage.

This november record could be the last one with the calidris gender this year....or may be not!!

The distances here are huge,very good to train the eye!

Calidris alpina (4ex)/031119/Zolina

Hiper cropped pic of the four migratory dunlins.